Hi folks. I’ve been trying to get to grips with blender for a few months now and I’m struggling a little bit with the NLA editor. I just wanted to check that two of my assumptions about the NLA editor are correct before I continue with it. They are as follows.
[1] The NLA editor is not intended to be used to build re-usable pieces of animation from previously defined actions involving various sections of an armature. So, for example, I can’t define 3 Actions like a clap cycle on the arms and hands, a walk cycle on the legs and then a third action on the entire armature for getting out of a chair, and then try to put them together in the NLA editor to compose a larger single action where a character is sat in a chair clapping, then gets up out of the chair and then walks forward whilst clapping. I get the impression it’s more for compositing animations of dirrerent objects in a scene and allowing them all to be animated at the same time, rather than a tool that’s mainly used for aiding the composition of numerous actions on a single object. Do I have this right, or have I missed something?
and
[2] The “End Frame” input of any “Action Clip” section of the panel that is displayed by pressing N when the mouse pointer is hovering over the NLA editor window should be “Start Frame” Number + Number of frames of animation in Action Clip. I notced a seemingly strange behaviour in to NLA editor where it is often “Start Frame Number”" + Number of frames of animation in Action Clip - 1. This causes repeated actions such as those of a walk cyle to drop a frame each time it loops unless I increase the “End Frame” by 1. For example a 1 second animation at 24 FPS should obviously need 240 frames if it is looped for 10 seconds, however if repeat is set to 10, the strip expands to 231 frames (as if the “End Frame” box is asking for the first frame immediately following the animation, rather the number of the last frame of the action that contains data about the action). If I remember to increase the action’s “End Frame” by 1 (because it always seems to default to “Start Frame” Number + Number of frames of animation in Action Clip), then the strip length will change to the expected length of 24 x 10 = 240. Is this a bug or intended behaviour or have I missed something altogether?